Grandkids trip to Mesa Verde

As I was thinking about our National Parks and the series I started thinking about some of the more memorable visits. I realized that the visits to each park have been memorable in their own way.
One park visit which we may not ever get to repeat again, hence, an incredible special visit was to Mesa Verde in July 2006. Now we have been to Mesa Verde before but this trip was different.
We’d originally planned a grandkids trip to the Southwest, exactly where I don’t even remember any more. Then my dad, who was very ill with cancer, told me that Mesa Verde was going to celebrate the 100th Anniversary that summer by opening up 2 sites: Mug House, never opened to the public and Oak Tree House, closed to the public in the 1930’s. From Memorial Day to Labor Day the park service was offering a hike every morning to the Oak Tree and each afternoon to the Mug House. Only 14 persons would be able to join each hike, 1 per day.
The prospect of visiting 2 sites 1 of which had never been opened was more than we could bear so I got on-line immediately. We were so lucky, we got into Mug House on one afternoon and the Oak Tree the following morning. The Oak Tree hike only had 6 openings left and that was just enough for Dale and I and the 4 grandkids.
Christabel turned 6 on our way to Mesa Verde when we stopped at Canyon de Chelly, Elias 8, Taylor 9 and Sunny 10. They were young but old enough to appreciate the incredible places we were about to visit.
On one of the hikes we had to cross the face of a cliff using ropes across the face. We had to use the toe holds made by the Native Americans while holding the ropes. Needless to say we were very concerned about the grandkids and especially Christabel crossing as we could not help them cross. They were great troopers crossing like their American Indian ancestors before them and had bragging rights for some time.
We do have an appreciation for those early settlers climbing up and down the cliffs with only toe holds. Yikes!
Fortunately our kids do not read these blogs. They have never heard all of the details that we conveniently left out!

Visiting the National Parks

After a week of the family drama and lots of hard work we are at a standstill with the cookie business. Mostly I need some money to get to the next stage, but I also need to do some footwork too on marketing and so forth. In the meantime we watched the Ken Burns special on the “National Parks” in order to escape the drama.

Dale and I have visited many of our nations National Parks and guessed all of the parks in the introduction because we have visited them. We have been lucky in that we love the parks system; we even were married in Yosemite.

So after watching the 1^st episode of the special I told Dale again, (I had this idea before) that our goal should be to visit every National Park. We have visited nearly every park in California, many in Arizona, NM and other states so it shouldn’t be that difficult to attain the goal should it?

The photo is of Nate and I on a hike in Bristlecone Pine Forest 8-08. I believe that one tree has been dated back about 10,000 years. The more narley the tree the older it is.

Boxing up the almonds

I had to just quit blogging for a few days. There has been lots of family garbage drama for the past few days and every time I’ve set down to write the words just flow about this situation. Who wants to read garbage? Well, probably everyone, but at this point I think that people would be hurt so it is best to put that writing aside for awhile.

Last week Dale and I met Nate at his father-in-law Allen Townsend’s house. Allen had picked up 3 boxes (about 4’x4’x4’) of raw almonds with each box holding 1 ton of almonds each. He had also picked up cardboard boxes and the plan was that we were to fill the boxes ourselves.

My job was to tape the box together at the bottom so that Nate, Dale and Allen could fill it with 50# of almonds. I then taped the box along the top and the guys stacked the box on a pallet.

It took us several hours of working but we were able to get everything boxed up by 8pm or so. We are now using the almonds to sell at the farmers markets. I smoked 4 trays today: 2 salt and pepper and 2 soaked in lime. The almonds are packaged and ready to sell.

p.s.: photos are by Emily Townsend

Photos for the County Fair

When I was a child my grandmother gave me a “Brownie Hawkeye” like hers. Like my grandmother I’ve loved to take photos.
Nearly every year for the past 8 years or so I’ve entered photos at our local county fair and as the grandkids have gotten old enough I’ve encouraged them to love taking photos. I'll attache their photos posts to come.

We have taken our grandkids on the “grandkid” trip once a year and of course all of the cameras come along. One weekend trip to Yosemite was called the Photo Shoot trip.

So it is the time of year for the County fair again and 2 of the 4 grandkids had photos that they wanted to enter. I took the photos in on Sat and read that judging occurred on yesterday. I’ll go to the free entry on Wed. the opening day between 3-5 and will see what, if any, awards that we got.

I'm attaching two of my 5 photos: one is of the Great Wall and the other Death Valley at dawn

Done please with this oven

Me, the person who has baked since I was a child, have confirmed that my oven is a piece of crap. This oven has been my bane since moving into this house 12 years ago.

The oven, in this house, is a built in style but the smallest one that is put into new homes. The oven consists of a microwave on top and electric oven below. They are wired together and are as one unit. This I learned when the latch on the microwave broke. The only place that would work on it would charge $80 to inspect and $80 min to repair and verified that we can’t replace one without the other.

Now I tried to bake some cookies and bars. Some over baked and most under baked. I bought a thermometer which showed that the temps ran from 325 to 360.

About 30 years ago I discovered the Viking brand range and have collected info on them since. This is my dream oven, although I’d take a Wolf instead if need be. I need only to find $9,000 to buy my dream oven.

Consumed with food

My life is consumed with food these days. I’m thinking about what to cook next, the cookie business, making and mailing the icing. I forgot about laundry and poor Dale was left with no clean clothes.

The house is getting dusty, stuff is everywhere but I don’t care, I just want to get these cookies off to market and cook more food from “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”.

In the meantime the backyard needs to be cleaned up and landscaping in the front weeded. Maybe tomorrow.

Home for September

For the 1st time in 12 years I’m home during Sept/Oct. There has been a hurricane every year during this time so I’ve always been working in the south or east coast.

Since I’m writing a new blog, for those of you who don’t know, I work as a claims adjuster estimating property damage from storms (cat adjuster). Last year when I started blogging I actually was driving away to work Hurricane Gustave in New Orleans.

There is always a charge when I get the call to deploy for a storm; new place, new adventures. It is strange to be starting a new business thinking that I may have worked my last storm. I’m afraid that a part of me will have that tug to get out of here when another storm hits no matter where this cookie scheme takes me.

Preparing for the Farmer's Market

The two granddaughters, Sunshine and Taylor, plus the neighbor girl Kristin and I spent the early afternoon preparing for tomorrow’s farmers market in Santa Clarita. We’d picked up the entire product from Nate last night.
He remembered the Almond Butter this time; he had forgotten it for the past two weeks and people were asking for it. But he did forget to bring the Roasted Almonds. They will keep but there are people who only want Roasted Almonds.
So tomorrow we have Blister Almonds, Almond Butter, Smoked Lime Almonds and Smoked Salt and Pepper Almonds. We also have raw almonds, some right off the ground still in the hull and some already shelled. We had to pick thru the shelled almonds as water had gotten to some and caused them to spoil so we had to remove them. The girls found some bugs as pointed them out, poking on them and yelling EEWW.
We’d hoped to have our cookies there this weekend as we had obtained the product liability insurance as required by L.A. County but now they have added another requirement to the list.
Now I’ll try to get our evening going as we have a very early morning.

New Possibilities

Over the last couple of days I’ve called every bakery nearby and a kitchen rental business trying to see if anyone would rent some space to me. All I heard was NO, NO, NO. And the kitchen rental didn’t even answer. I was really discouraged.
Well yesterday late afternoon the owner of the kitchen rental business called and we agreed that I would come by today.
My inspection of the kitchen indicates that they have all of the equipment that I need. As compared to the kitchen in S.B. the oven is very new. There are 3 Hobart’s with the smallest being the size we have in S.B.
After inspecting the kitchen I went back to the front office where both owners were. They told me that they made cookie dough for fundraisers among other things. The man told me that they are interested in carrying our cookie dough for their fundraisers. WOW!
I must get this thing on the road.

Not a Good Time in the kitchen

Sunshine needed to make some money so I had her make almond meal and help with other products. We made another batch of bars but after they were baked I thought that they looked funny. I lifted them and the whole thing was like one large cracker. UGH. We’d forgotten to add baking powder. Everything went into the trash.
I ran to the store to purchase more egg whites but once home I decided we’d quick mix up some cookie dough to get into the freezer. After getting one long roll in the freezer I thought I’d just bake one sheet for us. A timer went off and I glanced at the oven and saw flames in the oven. I opened the oven door and the paper under the cookies was on fire with ash throughout the over. Of course there were no oven mitts available but I did find some and sent Sunny out to get Dale. I got the cookies out and as they had only been in the oven about 3 minutes I sent them with the neighbor girl to finish baking them at her house.
Dale is cleaning the oven now so we will see if that takes care of the problem.

Labor Day Weekend, Part 1

The Labor Day holiday is this weekend. Dale doesn’t work so we will miss the extra money that he would normally bring home. He will still get an extra day off, big deal, there are no extra days off anymore, they just add on to the others days he has coming.
I’ve wanted to stay home for some time now but every weekend has been booked up so I have insisted on staying home this weekend. There is grass to trim; the patio is totally dusty and we can’t use it at all so needs to be washed down; some neighbor trees have roots that have traveled and are coming up in bad places and need to be cut down.
I’m actually quite anxious to get some projects done around here. I’ll take a before and after photo and post it.
I also plan to smoke some pork ribs, a pork roast and some salmon. We will BBQ a bunch of marinated chicken breasts, potatoes and veges that we pick up from the farmers market on Sunday morning that we will work.
We will be laboring on Labor Day.

The New Family Doctor

I’ve already written about our family doctor leaving us with no doctor and the hassles which have ensued. Well I’d called the insurance benefits people and they led me to the list of approved doctors in our insurance plan.
Now our old doctor is a D.O. which means that he is Osteopath, these doctors go to medical school but learn a more holistic approach to medicine.
I found a new doctor with the D.O. designation and set an appointment for today for each Dale and me.
We were both a little concerned today, we are seeing too many people our age and younger in the Obits. Not Good. Then I was looking up the address of the new Doc and saw that he had 4 comments; 2 bad and 2 great.
We were actually so impressed with the new doctor. For me he was very concerned about the lung problems I’d had in ’84 so ordered up some x-rays for a baseline. He read them while I was there and found nothing wrong. Also did the EKG for a baseline since heart disease runs in the family and read the results while I was there. He sat and answered questions and just discussed our general health much like our old doctor did.
So finally we have a new family doctor who seems to be good. The only problem I have is that my arm is sore from the flu/pneumonia shot they gave me.

Dale's Birthday

Today is Dale's birthday, 65 years old. Gosh he is really getting old, like I tell him, "years older than I am".
We’d driven from San Diego to Santa Barbara to bake but then it didn’t work out. Yesterday the kitchen wasn’t available to us so we headed home.
I washed a huge load of Dale’s whites as he was out of everything. As I opened the washer door I was horrified to see that the entire load was now PINK. Not just pink, but a hot pink. I found that my red Bejing Olympics tee had been included in the wash.
I was so upset but then started laughing at the site of Dale wearing a hot pink t-shirt, undies and socks. Then laughed so hard I couldn’t stop. I went outside where Dale was washing the car and between laughing told him about his new clothes for his birthday and we both had a good laugh.
He refuses to wear his hot pink socks though.